Testing the NGS live data feed

If anyone would like to test out the NGS replication, which I’ve setup from the test server, follow these instructions:

  • Download and install the mb_server source code from SVN trunk. Follow these instructions.
  • Set your server type in DBDefs.pm to RT_SLAVE
  • Download and import this dataset.
  • Insert this required row into the database, using our psql program:
    cd /admin
    ./psql READWRITE
    insert into replication_control values (1, 12, 36169, '2010-01-23 00:00:02.604674+00');
    
  • Now run admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges a few minutes after the hour to keep up to date with the data on the test server. Please note that this system may not be stable yet and that we will occaisionally load new data on our test server, which will require you to reload the data on your server.

Good luck!

Database on test server updated

The database on the test server has been updated with the latest data and search indexes to match the latest work that ijabz’ has done. This update was in preparation for testing the replication system, which I’ll invite the general public to try in a few hours.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The passwords on the test server are now the same as the passwords from the main server as of January 23.

Announcing NGS Beta 1!

After many years of discussion, planning and hard work, we’ve finally reached the much anticipated Next Generation Schema Beta 1 release!

For all the information on this release, please take a look at our release notes. Then head over to the test server and play with it!

Most important of all, please note that we are using Jira to keep track of bug for the MusicBrainz server now. Please do not enter bugs for Beta 1 into the old (trac) bug tracker!

Many thanks to the countless people who have helped make NGS a reality!

NGS Beta 1 is coming: Monday January 18

I’m pleased to announce that we’re almost ready to release beta 1 of the much anticipated Next Generation Schema. All of the important core functions are complete and we’ve even done a first round of sanity checking to make sure what what we release will be useful. We won’t have all of the features for NGS done — there will be some things that we simply won’t have finished by then.

But, this release is important since we feel that we want the community to help us take a look at NGS and help us flush out problems before we polish NGS for release.

We’ll have loads of more details and even some documentation for you by next monday. Stay tuned!

MetaBrainz hires Kuno Woudt (warp) as a full time developer!

I’m pleased to announce that the MetaBrainz Foundation has hired its first full time developer! On Februrary 1, 2010, Kuno Woudt will join Oliver Charles on the MusicBrainz development team and both of them will focus to finish NGS as soon as possible. With Kuno we are effectively tripling the engineering capacity we have dedicated to writing code for NGS. This will free me up to focus more on managing the development process as well as focusing on more business development issues. An increased focus on business should allow me to find the extra income to pay Kuno and to keep us in the black!

I’m excited by this development — having dedicated developers working on finishing NGS is what has been needed for several years now. I’m very much looking forward to releasing NGS and then having a number of smaller releases in 2010!

Privacy policy page re-written for clarity, policy remains unchanged

Navap undertook a re-write of our privacy policy page to make the page more consistent and better organized. However, the actual policy did not change — just the wording/formatting of the page has changed.

Please take a look at the diff of the changes and the new page.

(This post is mostly only for full disclosure — seeing Facebook being shredded for its new policy is making me overly cautious right now.)

MusicBrainz Summit 10 Wrapup

We’ve just finished our 10th MusicBrainz Summit, this time held in Nürnberg, Germany. It was a great success, with a number of participants and a lot of discussion! This time, we’ve managed to note all the discussions. So, if you missed the summit and want to catch up on what we talked about, head over to our wiki page with the summit notes, which contains a summary of just about everything we mentioned.

Thanks to everyone who came, and bring on the next summit!

New server image for 2009-05-24 release available

The VMWare image has been updated for the 2009-05-24 server release. The previous image was getting old and updating steps have been reported not easy.

The new image has been upgraded to Debian 5.0, includes a more recent Linux kernel and uses PosgreSQL 8.3 (the required version to work on NGS).

To download and play with the new image, read our VirtualMusicBrainzServer wiki page!